What happens after I sign?

The six phases

After you sign, the process breaks into six clear phases. It starts with a free discovery call, followed by a roughly 30-minute onboarding form where you tell us about your business, your customers, and your goals. From there we move into design, starting with a homepage mockup that we refine with you until it feels right. Development happens next, built out on a private staging site where nothing is public yet. Then comes soft launch, where you review the complete site before it goes live. Once you give the green light, you move into the grow phase: weekly updates, monthly reports, and ongoing support.

When billing starts

Your Platform & Hosting subscription starts at kickoff, the moment your onboarding form is in, not the day your site goes public. That’s intentional. Your staging environment, your software licenses, and your customer portal access all go live immediately, because the platform is doing work for you (holding your build, keeping licenses current, giving you a place to log in) well before launch day. Your platform is live from day one; your site just isn’t public yet.

Reviewing your site before it goes public

You don’t find out what your site looks like on launch day. Soft launch is built around a private staging link where you can click through the complete site, page by page, before anyone else sees it. We handle revisions and QA together during this phase, and nothing goes public until you’ve reviewed it and given the go-ahead. If something needs polish, that’s what soft launch is for.

Training before launch

Before your site goes live, we walk you through it directly: the site itself, your customer portal, and the page editor you’ll use for day-to-day edits. The goal is that you leave that walkthrough knowing exactly how to make simple changes yourself, and exactly how to reach us for everything else. Support doesn’t start as a mystery process you have to figure out after launch, it’s covered in the same conversation where you approve the site.

After launch: the grow phase

Once your site is public, the relationship doesn’t end, it shifts. The grow phase means weekly updates running in the background, a monthly report showing what happened on your site, and ongoing support for changes as you need them. For the full walkthrough with more detail on each phase, our Process page covers it start to finish.